“Transforming Your Life Story: How to Rewrite Your Narrative and Embrace Empowerment”

Life is a journey filled with twists, turns, and unexpected detours. We all have moments of pain and struggle. Moments when we feel trapped in a cycle of dwelling on the past and feeling powerless over circumstances.

The key to improving the situation lies in transforming life and this begins with changing the narrative we tell ourselves. The concept of “Rewrite Your Story” has been a powerful tool in reclaiming control of your life. Here are some ways to initiate this transformative process:

Embrace Your Story: Taking ownership of your story empowers you to shape the person you aspire to become. You hold the authority to choose which opinions are worth considering.

Name Your Story: Assigning an encouraging name to your story can positively influence your perspective and approach to life.

Turn the Page: Life is composed of multiple stages or chapters, and even if some have been challenging, you possess the advantage of starting anew and embracing change as you move forward.

Choose Your Supporting Characters: While you are the main character in your story, you also need supportive figures, some from past chapters and others you can introduce. Selecting empowering people in your life enables you to redefine your goals and take decisive action.

Act to Transform Your Life: Understand that challenges and setbacks are integral parts of your life story, an ongoing narrative. Embrace change as an opportunity and recognize that despite past events, the future remains well within your control.

Take Small Steps: Breaking larger goals into smaller, manageable steps allows you to celebrate each milestone achieved, keeping you motivated and reinforcing your progress.

Seek Professional Help: If you find yourself struggling to break free from a negative mindset, considering the guidance and support of a therapist or counselor can facilitate your journey of change.

By rewriting your story, you can pave the way for a more fulfilling and empowered future.

How to manage your emotional well-being in COVID-19

Mounting stress in the light of the current COVID-19 pandemic is understandable.

Social distancing and isolation while required can play havoc with our mental health, making us nervous about what the pandemic means for our present and future. Therefore, we need to work extra hard to manage our emotions well.

If you are feeling low, unmotivated and anxious, know that you are not alone. While no one can avoid the unexpected, here are some simple steps that can help you better face the current uncertainties –

1. Control what you can. Focus on the things that are within your control, even if it is as simple as cooking a meal or having medicines. It may be helpful for you to make a list of what you can and cannot control right now.
   
   For example, you can:
   
   
   • Establish routines to give your days and weeks some comforting structure.
   • Reframe your thoughts to be more present, to focus on only what is within your circle of control
     
     
2. Reduce the negativity: Our thoughts influence our emotions, which in turn influences our behaviours and our immunity. Reframing your thoughts around a situation can help manage your emotions, reducing feelings of anxiety.
   
   How can you reprogram your mindset?
   
   
   • Reflect on past successes:Recall a stressful event in the past— you survived! Give yourself love. Difficult times do pass, and you will get through this too.
     
     
   • Divert your thinking: When you find yourself imagining the worst-case scenarios, actively stop yourself, and put your mind elsewhere.
     
     
   • Limit exposure to news and media: Stress can make us compulsively check our news feeds and social media accounts. However, constant exposure to the negative news trickling in only serves to increase the worry. Try to limit your check-ins and avoid the news during the vulnerable times of day, such as right before bedtime.

“Watching or scrolling through the media makes us even more anxious. An excess of news and visual images about a traumatic event can create symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and poor health years later.”

Roxy Silver, PhD, UC

3. Get support – It is important to take the time to share our feelings and get warm, comforting, social support by video, phone, or text. Talking to others who have our best interests at heart goes a long way in making us feel and less alone. Here are some things to keep in mind:
   
   
   • Give and seek support from people in your inner circle. These should be people who care about you and will uplift you.
     
     
   • Don’t limit only to chats about the pandemic (see limit negative news, point #2). Use these connections to talk about the things you normally would – host your book club online; have a virtual party, etc.
     
     
   • Find ways of expressing kindness, patience, and compassion. This is a hard time for everyone. Humans across the world are sharing this experience with you. Helping others in need is critical to get through this well, and creates more purpose for our days and well-being.

Practising self-care with yoga and meditation can help.

4. Engage in self-care – Don’t let stress derail your healthy routines. Make efforts to eat well, good nutrition helps our mood. Anxiety and stress make us seek comfort foods, and in turn, high carbs and sugars affect our mood.
   
   
   • Meditate: Many people find stress relief in practices such as yoga and meditation. To get started, set aside five minutes in a quiet place to sit and breathe. Focus on the present moment; if stray thoughts intrude, acknowledge them and then let them go. Do not judge yourself for any mental wavering. Gently refocus and bring the attention back to the present moment.
     
     
   • Sleep well: Getting enough sleep keeps your immune system strong. It is also crucial for helping you mentally cope during this uncertain time. Having said that, it is completely natural to experience disturbed sleep patterns during this pandemic – including difficulties falling asleep, staying asleep, or waking earlier than you are used to in the morning. How can you sleep better? Try to have a consistent sleep routine that allows time to wind down before lights out. Meditation and relaxation can help with insomnia.
     
     
   • Plan an activity you like: When life gets overwhelming, people often drop their leisure activities first. However, cutting yourself off from pleasure can be counterproductive. Even when time is tight, look for opportunities to do something for yourself, whether that means reading a novel, singing along to your favourite tunes or streaming a comedy on Netflix. Humour and laughter can benefit both mental and physical health.

5. Take your own advice – Ask yourself – If a friend came to me with this worry, what would I tell her? Imagining your situation from the outside can often provide perspective and fresh ideas.  Some people are better at dealing with uncertainties than others are, so don’t beat yourself up if your tolerance for unpredictability is lower than a friend’s.

Ultimately, be gentle with yourself. Be compassionate to yourself for the losses that anyone might see in your life, for the invisible suffering only you can feel, and for your place in the misery of what has befallen us all in a million inexplicable ways.

If you still feel overwhelmed, are having trouble managing stress, and coping with uncertainty on your own, ask for help. Look for a psychologist or other mental health provider and expert in helping people develop healthy ways to cope with anxiety and fear.

Interested in having a chat? Drop us a line today.

Dealing with rejections :Building Confidence

We all experience rejection either from our parents, family,peers or employees. When you’ve experienced a hard rejection in your past, you may start to believe on some deep level that you are unlovable or unworthy. 

This is what cognitive therapists call a “core belief,” psychotherapist Erin Brandel Dykhuizen, says “Often when we have experienced a lot of rejection in childhood, we develop beliefs about not being worthy of love as a way to make sense of the fact that our parents, for example, who should have accepted us and shown us love, did not do so,”.

More often than not, people aren’t consciously aware that they have these beliefs. But if you take a close look at your behaviour, your thoughts, and your patterns in relationships, you may be able to trace those back to childhood

Developing more effective responses to rejection is an important life skill.These are few ways in which you can start –

1. Self-confidence is key– Feeling of being worthless or useless that may have been ingrained since childhood gets carried over into adulthood and other relationships. Start small to build it back by simply making a list every day with at least two or three things you have done well, contributions you have made, or positive things you have done and review them before you go to bed each night and again when you get up the next morning.
2. Change to positive self-talk. Notice what you say to yourself and choose to build yourself up, not tear yourself down. Start small by doing positive self talk while walking, taking bath or writing.
3. Remember, this too shall pass – Time changes this tough time will pass mean while give yourself credit for your skills and accomplishments, and remind yourself of all those experiences when you made good progress, solved a problem or helped someone. 
4. Take a deep breath– Take a deep breath, step back from the situation, and just breathe for a few minutes and  focus on present.
5. Practice reframing –Many times a situation seems worse because you react and then “frame it” as a negative about you. Instead, Choose to reframe it. Instead of thinking, “No one will ever love me, I’m unlovable,” you could reframe by thinking, “Relationships are hard for everyone; I’m no different. This was hard for me but I can learn something from it. Let me focus on what I can learn.”
6. Let it go – It’s okay to feel upset about rejection. After all, you are human and you have emotional responses. Let the emotions roll through you as you keep focusing on your breathing out. but don’t let them park and become long-term visitors.
7. Reconnecting with those who love us, or reaching out to members of groups to which we feel strong affinity and who value and accept us.The fact that a large portion of human emotion is devoted to the maintenance of interpersonal connections points to the importance of acceptance and belonging in human affairs. 

People are inherently motivated to be valued and accepted by other people, and many of the emotions that they experience reflect these fundamental interpersonal concerns.

Our mental health should be our priority and at the same time we must be supportive of other people battling with a similar condition.

For further guidance and assistance contact us at

https://www.metanoiathepositivemind.com/

Rejection Impacts

At sometime in our lives, we all face rejection.Everyone hates to be rejected or to be turned down, but then it is a fact of life .Not all the time everything will go as per our wishes and expectation.

Rejection in one or the other way will happen, from ostracism on the playground to romantic rejection, bullying at work, and social disregard for the aged, individuals are at constant risk of experiencing instances of social exclusion, dehumanisation, and discrimination.

Contemporary social psychologists study rejection in an array of forms and contexts. Rejection may be active or passive and involve physical or psychological distancing or exclusion. For example, individuals may be actively rejected when others voice negative views of them or tell them that their presence is not wanted.

In comparison, individuals may be passively rejected when others pay little attention to them or ignore them altogether (e.g., the silent treatment). Physical exclusion from a group elicits feelings of rejection in most circumstances (e.g., when an individual is purposefully left out), and psychological exclusion (e.g., when one’s opinions are discounted or ignored) is also experienced as a rejection.

From school shootings to domestic violence, from cognitive impairment to suicide attempts, the negative impact of social exclusion has been widely  documented.

These phenomena really hurts and have a powerful impact as testified by their immediate influence on people’s thoughts, emotions, and behaviours.

Sometimes it can also inflict severe/intense damage to our psychological well-being that goes beyond emotional pain.

Here are some ways that describe the effects rejection has on our emotions, thinking and behaviour.

1. Self Doubt – We often respond by starting to  find faults in ourselves ,be mourning all our inadequacies, kicking ourselves when we’re already down.
2. Low Self esteem – Blaming ourselves and attacking our self-worth only deepens the emotional pain we feel and makes it harder for us to recover emotionally.
3. Thinking clearly becomes difficult- Rejection temporarily lowers our IQ. Being asked to recall a recent rejection experience and relive the experience is enough to cause people to score significantly lower on subsequent IQ tests, tests of short–term memory, and tests of decision making.
4. Rejection does not respond to reason. Emotional upheaval is so strong that the reason makes no sense and usually the reactions are emotionally driven and regretted later.
5. Rejection destabilise– our “Need to Belong.” We all have a fundamental need to belong to a group. When we are rejected the feeling of being outcasted tends to add to the emotional pain.

There are ways to treat the psychological wounds rejection inflicts. It is possible to treat the emotional pain rejection elicits and to prevent the psychological, emotional, cognitive, and relationship fallouts that occur in its aftermath.

To do so effectively we must address each of our psychological wounds (i.e., soothe our emotional pain, reduce our anger and aggression, protect our self-esteem, and stabilize our need to belong).

I will be sharing tips on these in my next blog posts. Comment on what would you want me to cover in my next posts.

 

Shift your mind..change your life

Speak Up ..Reach out for help..

(If you need support or know someone who does, please reach out to your nearest mental health specialist.) You can also contact us @metanoia the positive mind

Everyone is shocked and sad after hearing the news of sudden demise of Sushant Singh Rajput who has been an inspiration for many. There have been lots of speculation and debates regarding the reason behind his untimely death.

We are no one to judge and dissect his life and personality but one thing is for sure these incidents /cases are on rise and cause of concern.

As per WHO, depression and suicide are on rise and according to a report by WHO 6.5 % of the Indian population suffer from some or the other mental disorders. Majority of the people who commit suicide are below 45years.  

While we have come a long way with regards to openly talking about mental health. It still remains stigma among many. We live in a world where people still think that mental health is not a very serious matter.

But it is that we give equal importance to mental and physical health especially as we are faced with new realities of working from home, temporary unemployment, home-schooling of children, and lack of physical contact with other family members, friends and colleagues.

Being fearful and anxious is normal during hard times.We wouldn’t be human if we weren’t anxious or afraid. It would be unrealistic to expect yourself to stay calm 100% of the time.

With the challenges of going through so many upheavals can be stressful and emotionally draining.

When you catch yourself anxious, fearful and stressed there are plenty of ways to help you stay calm.

Here are a few coping strategies to try .

1.Deep breathing – One of the easiest ways to manage stress, no matter where you are or what time it is. Breathe in deeply  through your nose and out through your mouth, holding each inward and outward breath for 5 seconds. Repeat for 3 to 5 minute.

2. Exercise –  Thirty minutes of exercise a day is good for mood and overall health. If that feels like too much right now, aim to go for a walk every other day, or stretch for few minutes each morning.

3. Get into positive Journaling – every day write down things that are positive in your life.

4.Make time for yourself– It can be a simple thing as enjoying your tea or watching your favourite show. Taking time out for self and engaging in self care helps to destress.

5. Use your support network – remember you are not alone in this.communicate with friends, family and people who are positive and empathetic.

6. Seek for help – Sometimes self help strategies aren’t enough to control or significantly reduce your stress level if that’s the case there are mental health professional who you can reach out to.

Our mental health should be our priority but at the same time, we must be supportive of other people battling with a similar condition.

*****************Aim is to reach out and help**********************

Please Share if you agree so that we can reach out to those who need help.

Smita Misra

National Award winner counsellor and Psychotherapist

REBT and NLP expert

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